The blind sectarian rampage, which has been waging a war on worship mosques, churches and religious shrines have become a modern Arab trade mark phenomenon, since what the western media called from the start the “Arab Spring” overwhelmed the Arab streets.

The sectarian rampage is sweeping away in its rage cultural treasures of archeology and history, hitting hard at the very foundations of the Arab and Islamic identity of the region, but more importantly tormenting the souls of the Arab Muslim and Christian believers who helplessly watch the safe havens of their places of worship being desecrated, looted, bombed, leveled to the ground and turned instead into traps of death and monuments of destruction by the “suicide bombers” who are shouting “God Is Great.”

The only regional precedent for the destruction of worship places on such a scale was the destruction of some one thousand mosques since the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. A research by Israeli professor Ayal Banbanetchi, Rapaport noted that after 1948, only 160 mosques remained in the area. In the following years, this number shrank to 40, meaning that 120 were destroyed. Palestinians in the Gaza Strip documented the names and locations of 47 mosques that were destroyed completely and 107 others partially damaged by Israeli bombing during the “Operation Cast Lead” in 2008.

May be because those crimes went unpunished the western public opinion turns a blind eye to the new Arab phenomenon.

Most likely, the leaders of the Israeli fundamentalist Jewish “Temple Mount and Land of Israel Faithful Movement” are watching closely and wondering whether the current destruction of mosques by the Muslims themselves would be enough justification to carry out the movement’s public threats to build the “third temple” on the debris of Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third holiest site, in Jerusalem.

It is noteworthy that this destructive phenomenon was an integral part of the “Arab Spring,” which so far has ousted two presidents in Egypt and three others in Tunisia, Yemen and Libya, but successfully contained in the Moroccan and Jordanian monarchies.

However containment has been so far unsuccessful in the Kingdom of Bahrain, where the ongoing anti-government mass protests still rage uncontainable to the extent that the tiny island kingdom was forced to invite a Saudi Arabian contingent of the GCC’s “Peninsula Shield Force” to move in for help. Nonetheless, opposition sources and the Bahrain Center for Human Rights reported “documented” attacks by “the ruling regime” on 37 Shiite mosques, destroying 27 of them, some one thousand years old.

Islamist Copy of Christian Inquisition

The “Arab Spring” was optimistically named after a season in nature during which life is reborn and was supposed to promise a renewal of the stagnant political, social and economic life in the Arab world, but unfortunately it turned instead into a sectarian season of killing, death and destruction by counterrevolution forces nurtured financially, logistically, militarily and politically by the most conservative among the Arab ruling regimes in the Arabian Peninsula and their U.S. – led western sponsors and backers.

The sectarian cleansing in Iraq and Syria committed by the exclusionist sectarian zealots has become an Islamist modern copy of the European Christian inquisition in the Middle Ages, with the difference that the old European one was more systematic and organized by the Vatican institution and its allied states while it is perpetrated by uncontrolled sporadic and shadowy gangs of terror in the modern Arab case. 

The fact that this horrible phenomenon came into life only with the U.S. – led invasion then occupation of Iraq in 2003 and exacerbated with the on - record U.S. campaign for a “regime change” in Syria could only be interpreted as an outcome of a premeditated policy to divide and rule in the Arab world.

On last August 24, the Maronite patriarch Bechara Boutros al-Rai’e told the Vatican Radio: “There is a plan to destroy the Arab world for political and economic interests and boost inter-confessional conflict between Sunnis and Shiites,” adding, “We are seeing the total destruction of what Christians managed to build in 1,400 years” in terms of peaceful cohabitation and coexistence with Muslims.

This interpretation is vindicated, for example, by the fact that both the sectarian ruling antagonists, who were brought to power in Iraq by the invading U.S. army, and the al-Qaida –linked protagonists, whose presence in Iraq coincided with the U.S. occupation of the country and who are waging a sectarian war of terror to remove them from power, were both U.S. – made warriors, the first as the “democratic opposition” to the national “dictatorship” of late Saddam Hussein and the second as the “freedom fighters” against the military occupation of Afghanistan by the former Soviet Union “empire of evil,” according to the U.S. propaganda terminology.

In Iraq, the AFP on last May 20 reported that a “war on mosques” still “rages.” Seven years earlier the bombing of the dome of the Shiite Al Askari Mosque in Samarra, or the Golden Mosque, was followed by attacks on more than 200 Sunni mosques within two days according to the UN mission in the country. This is indeed a sectarian civil war, but its seeds were sown during the U.S. “Operation Phantom Fury” in 2004 on what Iraqis call “the city of mosques” of Fallujah, where scores of mosques were destroyed completely or damaged by the Americans.

Singling out Plight of Christians Misleading

Misleadingly or otherwise, the mainstream western media is singling out the plight of Arab Christians in this blind rampage, although their plight is incomparable to that of their Muslim compatriots neither in numbers and magnitude of the phenomenon nor in the resulting human, social, political, cultural and material losses.

Writing in the Gulf News on this September 11, Dr. Joseph A. Kechichian said “it was impossible to separate the fate of Arab Christians from their Muslim brethren, a term used here in the sense of fellow citizens not necessarily brotherhood. Indeed, when Iraqi, Egyptian and now Syrian churches were/are destroyed, it is necessary to also note that Sunni and Shiite mosques were and are shelled on a regular basis.”

In Iraq for example more than sixty churches were attacked since the U.S. invasion in 2003, but more than four hundred Muslim mosques were targeted. An estimate of two thirds of Iraq’s 1.5 million Christians have been forced to flee the country, but four million Iraqi Muslims became refugees abroad and a few millions more were internally displaced as the result of mass sectarian cleansing campaigns. Patriarch al-Rai’e accused the international community of “total silence” over Iraq.

However, proportionally Arab Christians are now a threatened species. Writing in Foreign Affairs on this September 13, Reza Aslan expected “no significant Christian presence in the Middle East in another generation or two” because “What we are witnessing is nothing less than a regional religious cleansing that will soon prove to be a historic disaster for Christians and Muslims alike.”

On this September 16 in the town of Mezda south of Tripoli, the tomb and minaret of Sheikh Ahmad al-Sunni mosque were bombed, a cemetery was dug up. In the capital, Tripoli, itself explosives were detonated by remote control late last March inside the Muslim Sufi ancient shrine of Sidi Mohammed al-Andalosi. These “incidents” were the latest sectarian rampage. Last year, The New York Times reported on August 25 the bulldozing of a mosque containing Sufi Muslim graves “in broad daylight” in the “center” of the Libyan capital. A mosque library was set on fire a day earlier. Scores of similar assaults since the “revolution” toppled the Muammar Gaddafi regime late in 2011, including one against the tomb of 15th-century Muslim scholar Abdel Salam al-Asmar, led UNESCO to urge an “end to attacks on Libyan Sufi mosques.” UNESCO’s Director General Irina Bokova warned the attacks “must be halted if Libyan society is to complete its transition to democracy.”

In January this year, the “revolutionary” government of Tunisia announced an “emergency” plan to protect the Sufi mausoleums from similar sectarian vandalism, including against two of the best known Sufi shrines of Saida Manoubia and Sidi Abdel Aziz. UNESCO’s appeal to “Tunisian authorities to take urgent measures to protect the heritage sites, which represent the country's cultural and historical wealth” did not stop the sectarian rampage. In February this year The Union of Sufi Brotherhoods in Tunisia reported at least thirty-four shrines were attacked since the revolution forced former president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali into exile in Saudi Arabia in 2011; the number is higher according to other reports and the attacks continue.

In Egypt, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had called the recent attacks on mosques and churches “unacceptable.” As recently as August 14, supporters of the first elected Egyptian president and the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohammad Morsi, who was removed from power on July 3rd, occupied Delga, a remote town of 120,000 people in Minya province in central Egypt, in a wave of retaliation attacks on dozens of police stations, manpowered mostly by Muslim Egyptians, and at least 42 Christian churches, of which 37 were burnt and looted.

British The Guardian on September 16 reported: “According to Christians in Delga, huge mobs carrying machetes and firearms then attacked dozens of Coptic properties, including the 1,600-year-old monastery of the Virgin Mary and St Abraam,” torched three of the five churches in the town, looting everything, killing some Coptic compatriots, forcing scores of Christian families to escape the town, and those who remained were forced to pay “protection money.” After more than two months, authorities recaptured the town last week ending their ordeal.

Delga’s story was not the latest nor the longest, ugliest or largest of the blind sectarian atrocities; to look for these, observers will find plenty of ongoing daily manifestations of these atrocities in Iraq and Syria where they are still raging at large, and where the control of authorities could be the guess of anybody for the unforeseeable future, threatening to spill over to the neighboring Arab countries of Lebanon and Jordan as well as to the non-Arab and NATO member Turkey.

The Cradle of Diversity and Coexistence

The political degradation of the “Arab Spring” into a sectarian counterrevolution is best illustrated in Syria. The former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in a recent UPI report described the current conflict in the country as a “Sunni confessional revolution” against a ruling regime supported by other religious minorities. Kissinger was not accurate. The majority of the Sunni Muslims in the major cities of Damascus and Aleppo, which together are the home of half the population, are against the sectarian “revolution” led by al-Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood, which are not considered representatives of mainstream Islam or Muslims.

On last August 30 UNESCO warned that a rich cultural heritage was being devastated by the conflict now in its third year, from Aleppo’s Umayyad Mosque to the Crac des Chevaliers castle dating from the 13th century Crusades.

The BBC on last April 23 quoted the Melkite Greek Catholic Patriarch of the church of Antioch, Gregorios III Laham, as saying recently that more than 1,000 Christians had been killed, "entire villages… cleared of their Christian inhabitants", and more than 40 churches and Christian centres damaged or destroyed. He reported that 450,000 of Syria’s two million Christians have been displaced.

However the magnitude of the plight of the Arab Syrian Christians should be seen within the context of the wider disaster that befell the Muslim majority as a whole. More than one hundred thousand Syrians are reported killed so far, hundreds of “Sunni” mosques targeted, one third of the more than 23 million Syrians, overwhelmingly Muslims of all sects, are now either refugees abroad or internally displaced. It’s a national disaster and not only a Christian one.

The Catholic Pope Francis declared September 7 a day of fasting and prayer for peace in Syria worldwide and his declaration was received positively among other Christian churches as well as among the mainstream Arab Muslim public opinion.

Two days ahead of “the day,” Islamist sectarian counterrevolutionaries of Al Qaida-linked rebels, especially Jabhat Al Nusra and the more extremist Ahrar Al Sham, targeted what Wadie el-Khazen, chairman of the Maronite General Council, described as “the most important Christian stronghold in Syria and the Middle East,” namely the Syrian town of Maloula, which “retained its Aramaic heritage since Christ spoke Aramaic” and holds many of the oldest monasteries and churches, including Mar Thecla that predates the Council of Nicea in 325 AD. Shouting “God is Great,” they declared they “won the city of the Crusaders,” which became a “ghost town” within hours.

It was a clear retaliation message to Pope Francis for not blessing their ongoing sectarian counterrevolution.

Longer before the Americans of the “new world” started to pose as the apostles who lecture and preach them, Syria has been the oldest cradle of religious and ethnic diversity and coexistence. Therefore the sectarian counterrevolution is now fighting in Syria its bloodiest battle, the result of which will make or break its rising tide for a long time to come.

* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com

John 12:24: "Most certainly I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains by itself alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit." 

 On September 14, 1982, on the day Lebanon was celebrating the Day of the Holy Cross, its President-elect, Sheik Bachir Gemayel, passed away into the hands of the Almighty God after carrying the cross of the country to heaven. He was not even 34 years old, but what he achieved for the freedom and dignity of Lebanon places him among the great men who left a stamp of glory on the history of Lebanon. 

Bachir, the hero, dreamt of a sovereign, free and independent Lebanon, and his dream became the objective of all free-minded Lebanese men and women. And even as the hands of evil and hatred took him away through a cowardly assassination plot (14/09/82), his dream lives on in the fiber of our people and their conscience for as long as the Cedars of Lebanon tower over the country from their peaks.  

Today we remember Bachir in our prayers. We also remember his fallen comrades who gave so much for our beloved country, and we learn from their sacrifice many a lesson. With this 31 remembrance day, our hopes are renewed, our determination is re-energized, and our commitment to the cause is re-confirmed.

 Bachir’s bright star was high in the skies of Lebanon and with it the hopes of the Lebanese people. But the joy was killed and the hopes dashed when his star fell from the skies, a martyr to his noble ambitions aiming at building a strong Lebanon, confirmed in its sovereignty and independence.  

Bachir believed that "the one Lebanon is the Lebanon of the 10,452 km2, that the Lebanese must win back completely so that it belongs to its sons and daughters in all their communities, creeds, and beliefs". But even as he departed, what he believed in remains in the hearts and minds of all the Lebanese people. 

Bachir was raised on the cross of Lebanon on the day we remember the Cross. He was killed in a political act at the intersection of the interests of nations, individuals, and terrorist groups that feared for their own egotistical interests should a unified, free and sovereign Lebanon rise from its ashes. Bachir established the framework and then was unjustly taken from us too soon.

Those same regimes of evil, Syria and Iran, and groups and factions like the terrorists, Hezbollah, continue today to hold the Lebanese people and their country hostage to their greed, hatred, and savage schemes. They have mastered the art of subservience and bowing at the doorstep of the forces of occupation. They are shepherds of doom who have reneged on every pledge they made and abandoned their flock. 

They are factions whose job is to drive wedges between the free people of the Land of the Cedars, assassinating their aspirations and hopes in deed, thought, decision and execution. They assassinate Lebanon every morning and every hour of their waking day, killing its sovereignty, its free decision-making, its democracy and culture. 

Bachir's venomous assassination still lingers to this day in all its ugliness, its corruption and its neglect.  It still lingers in its displacement and emigration, dhimmitude, apostasy, with economic, social, financial, political, security and patriotic decline.

It still lingers with the rule of personal over national interests. It still lingers with the dismemberment of the political parties; the politicization of the judiciary; the truncation of sovereignty with the imposition of foreign interference, and the abandonment of human, religious and ethical values. 

Bachir’s dream is here to stay and will never disappear, because it is the dream of a people who want a dignified life, a dream that calls upon unity, sovereignty and peace. 

We are today together to remember the martyrdom of Bachir and his 22 comrades, lifting our eyes and hearts in the midst of danger and trouble to the redeemer of suffering humanity, Jesus-Christ, who said "And if I were to rise above the earth, I shall take with me everyone" (John12/32). We ask Him for light, faith, strength, and hope to continue our march forward and lift ourselves, our homeland, and our people to victory, to peace, to righteousness, to freedom and to all that is good in this world. For Bachir is alive in our beings and in our minds. 

Sheik Bachir, Lebanon's elected president who was assassinated before assuming his presidential responsibilities was and still is the patriotic blessed yeast that was brewed and produced solid foundations of freedom, sovereignty and independence, as well as perseverance and hope in all Lebanese minds and hearts. 

See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jp0_NJaLhb4 .

Terrorists and powers of evil could not destroy the dream that Bachir left for us. Even the gates of  hell shall not be able to shake our deeply-rooted faith in peace, love and democracy. Bachir is the grain of wheat and the yeast. Bachir's dream is alive and glowing.  As expressed in Galatians 5:9: "A little yeast grows through the whole lump".

            By Dr Dennis Walker,  Researcher,

                  Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, Caulfield 3145. 

                   Email: --- dennis.walker@monash.edu

                   Phone: 9540 8441 (mornings).

WORLD WAR I’s IMPACT UPON IDEOLOGY

              The havoc of WWI was assessed --- or experienced --- by many in Lebanon as an end of hope and of meaning in history.  Preceding assumptions among Lebanon’s Catholics that God or alternatively Progress (both as conceptualized from Europe) would order history towards human welfare faced a severe challenge from the death of millions.  Clericist Catholic ideologues had to restructure Catholic Christianity to make it find meaning in such slaughter and prevent or contain future conflict.  The War had similarly devastated secular world-views in the Arab East.  The Western states that had claimed to stand for Enlightenment, rationality and Progress had shown their capacity for atavistic devastation against each other.  Thus, Lebanese and other Arab quasi-secularists now searched for supplementary meanings from established religions, although mostly in a theosophical way. 

                 As disrespect spread in the world towards European states and cultures, the Maronite clerical writers responded to the maneuverings of Muslim apologists, the Arab theosophists and freemasons and the Arab post-Christian anti-clerics to highlight their creeds, not Catholicism, as the solutions to conflict.  Both post-Christian anti-clericists and modernist salafi Islamists had long cited the crusader wars and the Inquisition as past violence and terror by the Church of Rome.  An _al-Mashriq_ article by Fr Butrus Faraj Sufayr, “The Church and Resistance to Wars,” welcomed that a group of eminent Englishmen were launching a League of Religions.  Its ambitious aim was to organize spiritual forces in the world to strengthen general peace and the joint interests of nations.  _al-Mashriq_ recognized among those attending the England conference names of people representing different religions and sects, bishops and rabbis, as well as major thinkers and people working for social reform.

                Fr Sufayr had been budged somewhat by the slaughter of the War from _al-Mashriq_’s previous robust faith in the capacity of Catholicism to go it alone in history.  He welcomed the League (and greater readiness to consider religion of the Mason Jurji Zaydan’s _al-Hilal_ that publicized it) as opening the way for an expanded role for the Church in international relations.  Only through religion as the force with the most influence in the world over people could humanity be led to the peace that had so long eluded it.  “Those who in ancient and modern history worked most to end wars, or at least lessen their horrors, were the men of religion, and in particular the high clerics of the most widespread religion in the world, the Catholic Church”. 

               Fr Sufayr had partly penned his article out of fury at an essay by the West-acculturated Indian Syed Ameer ‘Ali (1849-1928), translated in Egypt’s journal _al-Bayan_, which had striven to contrast Islam to the failure of Christianity after the Roman Empire adopted it to at all lessen the horrors of wars, oppression and extermination: Christianity had refused to address issues of international relations and reciprocal duties between peoples.  Sufayr retorted that Jesus set up the Church in the first place as the mechanism to establish in this world, after He ascended, his social teachings, and peace in given societies and in international relations.  As Paul had put it, there no more remained amongst those who accepted Christ Jew nor Greek, not slave nor freeman, neither male nor female: all of them have become equal and one in the Messiah (Galatians 3:28).  Sufayr cited NT verses that exhorted to forbearing pacifism even towards enemies: “do not allow evil to overwhelm you but overwhelm it by goodness".

             The writer challenged the Islamic apologists to muster for Islam clear verses on this level.  The saying of the Prophet Muhammad that Ameer ‘Ali had cited, “bind yourself to he who cuts you off and be charitable to those who injure you”, had been established by _al-Mashriq_ magazine years before to have been all lifted from the Bible to the very letter.

               In face of all the death of World War I, Sufayr argued that the Universal Catholic Church was the force most able to bring the world peace.  Far from being part of past or recent violence in Europe, the Church and its Popes had acted as the arbitrator to decide between kings and princes whose proclivities could have ignited war and social conflict. In the middle ages, popes in Rome, when they saw ill-treatment by some Kings against their subjects, defended those who had been oppressed without any fear of the power that those tyrants exercized.   Henry IV, the Emperor of Germany who ignited in Europe a war that inflicted catastrophes on its lands, finally was forced to submit and desist before the wise old man of Rome.

              This characterization by Sufayr ignored that Pope Gregory VII (1073-85) was no such wise arbitrator who only intervened to bridle kings after they became violent and expansionist or repressive at home.   Rather, it was the simultaneous drives of both he and Henry IV to expand their respective power-systems that drew them to their collisions.   Gregory may have founded the Papacy’s long-term supremacy over the Catholic churches and its claim to supervize the secular rulers of Europe, but in his life-time his drive to reduce kings to vassals sparked grotesque situations of double-popes and alternate kings or emperors for Germany and fighting and looting in holy Rome that far from fostered peace or stability or any regard for religion and the Church.   When Henry, in the last bout, marched into Rome, he put his anti-pope on the throne of the abandoned Gregory who then died with little dignity in exile in 1085.  Pope Gregory was close to the paradigms of the Arabic freemasons, anti-clericists, freethinkers and the Muslim polemicists that the popes and Christian churches in general could not stop themselves from intervening destructively in politics and intellectual life, from which religion had to be excluded.

               Sufayr argued that the papacy carried its immemorial arbitrative role in international high politics forward into modern history when its mediation by Pope Leo XIII in 1885 settled the conflict that developed between Germany and Spain over the Caroline Islands.  Peru and Chile, too, made Pope Leo and then Pius X arbitrators for the demarcation of borders between them. 

              Given the Church’s track-record in settling a host of disputes and wars, the sidelining of it from modern peacemaking had to be ended.   “Would not the world have avoided all the terrors and hatreds of the last World War, had Austria and Serbia both taken to the Holy See the issues of that conflict that set off all these wars and caused so much suffering?”

             Sufayr was being selective.   The Italian nationalists had in 1861 made papal territories in Rome their capital: then Leo XIII (1878-1903) had indeed labored to build for the papacy an important role in international affairs, stressing the high cost of an armed peace.  But the Carolines in 1885 had been his only success, and he was not invited to the Hague Peace Conference of 1899 because of objections from the Italian government.  Leo had been reduced to courting support from post-Kulturkampf Germany and from positivist France for a settlement of the Roman question.  Sufayr fleeted over the extent to which the international Catholic church had been cut down, sidelined, marginalized and hit by secularist, anti-clerical or downrightly anti-Christian regimes in Europe and Latin America that were determined to transform their national societies and their world standing without any trammels or meddling from the Church.

              Lebanon’s clericists remained on the defensive against Arab secularists who held up modern Europe’s secularism.   Sufayr had something of Louis Shaykhu’s animus against Europe’s modernity and strove to turn the late War against it to argue a religious imperative in history:

“Today the illusion is dying away that Science and cultivation and civilisation can ameliorate customs and bring people’s natures under control, and so eliminate the causes of conflicts.  The events of the last few years have shown that all the development of modern sciences only turned them into a terrible instrument that have made War unprecedentedly barbarous and destructive.  It all proved that nothing can now free humanity from wars other than religions”.

            He rebutted the charges from Islamists and Christian-born Arab free-thinkers that the church had itself exercized military aggression or whipped up violence by others.  The popes had maintained properties to sustain the church, and this understandably led to the creation of a state which the Pope of Rome then had to defend by force if it were invaded.  (Answering radically secular Italian nationalists?)  The crusader wars were only defensive and proportionate.  The Islamic states as their territories widened were threatening the Christian kingdoms until they became very close to their great capitals.  The aim of the crusader wars was only to deliver the holy places from the hands of those who had usurped and violated them.  Fr Sufayr made this argument easy for himself: the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim bi-Amr Illah --- considered an insane non-Muslim by the world’s Sunnis --- had destroyed 30,000 Christian churches after the Church of the Resurrection in noble Jerusalem.  Could anyone really blame the church for trying to wrest back and then defend the holiest lands of its religion?  The same thing applies to all its actions to beat off from Europe the advancing tide of the Turkish state which the Muslims themselves [=Arab nationalists including Rashid Rida, Egypto-Syrian editor of _al-Manar_] as well as the Christians condemned.  Some charges of the Arab free-thinkers and such salafists as Rida and his mentor Muhammad Abduh and the acculturated Muslim apologists had cut close to home: “we are far from approving the height of the injustices that some Kings of the Christians reached, like the 1572 Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre and some aspects of the Inquisition in Spain.  The Church [leaders] not only did not incite such acts but was the first to rebuke them”  FN[[Fr Butrus Faraj Sufayr, “al-Kanisah wa Munahadat al-Hurub” (The Church and Resistance to Wars), _al-Mashriq_ July 1920 pp. 524-534.   Before the 1572 St Bartholemew’s Day massacre of Protestants, only one of several, France’s king Charles IX shouted “Qu’on les tue tous”, and viewed from his palace the killings that carried off most of the Huguenot nobility.  The slaughter, though, had been triggered by political events and factions rather than preplanned: W. J. Stankiewicz,  “St Bartholemew’s Day, Massacre of”, _Catholic Encyclopaedia_.  Arabic writers, post-Christian or Muslim, hostile to the Catholic Church could indeed have exaggerated wrong acts by the Inquisition. Early post-modern  historiographies were to reassess that institution, although with some institutional projection from a Catholic Church now more prepared to admit that there might have been some faults or mistakes in the past.  See eg. Henry Kamen, _The Spanish Inquisition : a historical revision_ (Yale University Press: 1999).   In 1998, an International Symposium on the Inquisition was organized in Rome: see “Facing the Inquisition”,   _The Tablet_ 7 November  1998; “Vatican meeting examines dark chapter of the Church”,  _National Catholic Reporter_ 13 November 1998; “The Inquisition requires calm objective analysis”, _L’Osservatore Romano_ [English]  11 November 1998.  References from Rosalie Cotter, Deputy Librarian at Catholic Theological College, Melbourne]]FN.

                   We should not overrate ecumenical glimmerings in Fr Sufayr that such devastation in the late War now could force clergy of varied religions to work together.  Sufayr might indeed accept even the odd token rabbi, but he voiced no sense that Muslim clerics might have to be inducted into the peace-making, or that Lebanon’s Catholics had anything to learn from the Islam massively flowing around them.  He reflected that such Muslim polemicists as Ameer ‘Ali when denouncing Catholicism confused it with the atrocities of the Protestant churches in history, and tapped the writings of that West’s anti-Catholic freemasons and freethinkers as well as its Protestants.   Ameer ‘Ali (and Muhammad ‘Abduh, also) certainly painted vivid snapshots of the Inquisition’s burnings, and of the mass slaughters of 70,000 Muslim and Jews by the crusaders when they took Jerusalem and against such groups as the Huguenots --- and the Albigenses whom Sufayr retorted were the aggressors whose “flood” the pontifs of Rome blocked FN[[See Sufayr, “Munahadat” p. 532 as against Ameer ‘Ali’s portrayal of both Catholic and Protestant history as “an uninterrupted chain of intolerance, bigotry and fanaticism” down to the extermination of Amerindians and the USA’s lynchings, in his 1922 _The Spirit of Islam: A History of the Evolution and Ideals of Islam, with a Life of the Prophet_ (London: Christophers’ 1922) pp. 218-221 and his 1889 _Short History of the Saracens_ (London: MacMillan & Co Ltd 1951) pp. 350-372.  Yet ‘Ali discreetly allowed that the Catholic Church after the break of Luther and Calvin made its peace with science, and thus offered a lesson to the restrictive “Sunni Church” of 1922 (_The Spirit of Islam_ p. 454) --- nuances towards the West in acculturated Muslim “apologetics” that Lebanese clerical intellectuals have often missed.   From _al-Manar_ in 1902, Muhammad ‘Abduh assailed persecution and expulsion by Catholics and Protestant Churches alike of Muslims, Jews, proto-scientists and freethinkers: _al-Islam wal-Nasraniyyah ma‘al-‘Ilm wal-Madaniyyah_ (Cairo: Muhammad 'Ali Subayh & Sons, n.d.) pp. 40-41, 64-65.  The Albigensian Crusade proclaimed by Pope Innocent III early in the 13th century had swept away perhaps one million humans and a brilliant Provencal civilization by the time the Church extirpated the Cathar religion in Languedoc: see Christine Thouzellier, _Catharism et Valdeism en Languedoc_ (Louvain: Editions Nauwwelaerts 1969) and Arno Borst _Die Katharer_ (Stuttgart: Hiersemann 1953)]]FN.

                Secularist and Muslim discourse about wars had thus put clerical Catholic writers in Arabic on the defensive.   Yet, though he tried to keep up a granite-hard Catholic apologetics, World War I had buckled Sufayr’s frames of reference in places as it had those of all the factions of Arabic.   His semi-quietist passages that religion and the Church could only ameliorate, not end, social injustice could have been closer to Christianity’s New Testament and sense of original sin.   But the WW1 havoc and the taunts from the Islamists had pushed him to make Jesus the founder of International Law as he claimed a role for the Catholic Church in international relations and politics like that that Islam’s modernists were now imaging for Islam.

              It needed strenuous footwork to deny after 1918 that Christianity and its institutions had failed to motivate its adherents in Europe and the West towards peace and constructive solutions.  Catholic writers and media in Lebanon were restructuring Catholicism in order to maintain it, but many felt that other instruments and groups had to be synthesized with Christianity to save humanity.  Thus, _al-Mashriq_ also gave a hearing to the new international mechanism of the League of Nations, more neutral and secular than the Church, which it saw as set up by governments in response to pressure from the populations that had lost so much blood. The author, Emile Tayyan, was a student at the French Law School who was to become a lecturer in Law at St Joseph’s College.   In 1920, the young Tayyan was in places Francophile in a way conventional among Maronites at that time.  France had acted rightly to exclude Germany from the League of Nations following World War I.  Some had expressed surprise that the Central States and their allies were not accepted into the League, when such a League “by definition… could hardly preserve the peace if it took on the appearance of an alliance of some peoples against others”.  Tayyan retorted that a League meant to promote freedom and justice and the observance of international undertakings could not admit states that had constantly broken their contracts and undertakings and barbarically swooped down upon others [=Germany’s invasion of Belgium and France].  Since actions by the League had to be adopted in advance by unanimous vote, it had been right to exclude such states as Germany and Soviet Russia that it had to control.

           In places, though, Tayyan’s youthful essay diverged from the battered secular-ameliorist ideology of the French State whose language he loved.  Could so purely legal an institution as the League unaided establish and preserve peace?  The young Maronite writer decried the exclusion by the founders of the League of the Papacy, which had immense moral authority over more than 250,000,000 inhabitants of the civilized world.  That exclusion cost the League of Nations what could have been one of the most effective means to achieve its aims. 

            However Catholicist, Tayyan’s view of international relations still privileged the France whose language was his preferred medium of formal expression. He wanted France to be exempt from the disarmament into which the League was to lead its members in order to prevent any future World War.  The League’s Executive Council would let a state surrounded by enemy states hell-bent to seize its lands maintain a standing army much larger than that of a state that did not face such pressure.  France is the state that safeguards the borders of civilization as President Wilson put it: in this function, it had to have a stronger military machine than those of other states such as Italy or indeed the U.S.A.  The League’s inspections could not cope with concealed military equipment [=Germany] and the capacity of states to mobilize and attack swiftly.  Because collective League decisions had to be unanimous, its members were unlikely to act together to defend France from an attack by Germany.  When Persia, one of the League’s members, appealed for its help when Bolshevik troops attacked it, the other League members only held repeated meetings to get out of their undertakings.

            Tayyan’s arguments --- well-presented for a young man --- at least here amounted to a dispiriting characterization of the West’s Christian states as weak, mendacious, cunning and violent.  Intentionally or not, he might have been feeding the reaction among Christian Lebanese against Westerners in general in the wake of WW1, sparked by international realpolitik, contempt from French personnel and military in Lebanon, and by cultural incompatibility.  In a critique of a range of Western states, not just Germany alone, Tayyan condemned the colonialist expansionism that Britain had carried forward through WW1.  He feared that her takeover of Germany’s former colonies (eg. South West Africa and Cameroon) with the League’s ratification would become permanent since none of its texts gave it either the title or the means to supervise and end such supposed “protectorates” or “trusteeships”.   Even if the League had such a function nominally, who was there to compel the imperial state to withdraw from a trustee territory as its population became more able to govern itself?  While dislike of Britain and being Francophile could go together in the 1920s, Tayyan then denounced Rome as a precursor of “civilized” states bent on conquests in his day.  The nature of human beings has not changed for thousands of years: the ancient Romans when they conquered a town, depriving it of its liberty used to then term it free or allied.  “We only hope that the new words will amount to more than a veil”.  Whatever his exact intention, Tayyan had got very close here to France which presented herself as the Latin successor of imperial Rome in the Levant, and some of whose Christian Lebanese admirers gave her title to use Roman-like severity to crush all local resistance as a prelude to the prosperity both Latin powers brought to those who cooperated in the Fertile Crescent FN[[In a 1922 _al-Mashriq_ article, Fr Rene Mouterde imaged that Pompey’s 64 BC conquest was welcomed by many in the Hellenized classes in Syria as an end to the debilitating wars with Egypt, local tyrants and raiding tribes.  Mouterde likened the latter to the Shi’ite groups that attacked Lebanese Christians in the wake of WW1, and which Rome’s successor France was ending: Mouterde, “Musalamat al-Ruman li-Suriyyah wa Difa‘uhum ‘anha” (The Romans’ Pacification of Syria and their Defence of it), _al-Mashriq_ March 1922 pp. 272-280.  This article skilfully cited some archaeological data from Western and local scholars, but could hardly be trusted given that Mouterde was encouraging the Syrians, in thanks for the “kindness” that Latin France was doing them, to volunteer in her armies as their ancestors had flocked into those of the original Roman State: p. 280]]FN.

          Yet Tayyan was highly French-cultured in scanning centuries of France’s history for ideas that had directed humanity towards the more valid impulses in the League project.  The concept of the League of Nations was not original to U.S. President Wilson.  In the wars of religion that devastated the continent, and then the Thirty Years War, Sully (1559-1641) and Abbe Saint-Pierre (1658-1743) called for Europe’s kings to form some confederal council of states to arbitrate international disputes between them and support any of their members facing any aggression.  Tayyan praised Saint Pierre as the first of those pioneer authors to detail a mechanism of a peace-keeping army.  In modern times, continued Tayyan, the French politician Leon Bourgeois a few years before WW1 published a book [_Pour la Societe des Nations_ 1910] in which he projected a League of Nations for compulsory arbitration, good offices and mediation in international disputes and which would implement its decisions through a peace-keeping army drawn from all states.  However, Tayyan also took some account of discussion of a League mechanism by various U.S. politicians prior to 1918 FN[[Amil Tayyan, “Jam‘iyyat al-Umam” (The League of Nations), _al-Mashriq_ October 1920 pp. 754-768]]FN.

              Tayyan wanted to connect the papacy into any international peace-keeping mechanism, but could have well known the ambiguity of the French ideas he reviewed.   The radical freemasonic post-Catholics in Lebanon had made most literate Maronites aware of the Saint Bartholemew’s Day massacre of Protestants that even Sufayr had not tried to defend.   Did so confessionally ambiguous a figure as Sully, who escaped it but converted, or his equally ambiguous monarch Henry IV represent a Catholic stream of French thought or had they prefigured a more secular one?

             All groups of literate Lebanese Catholics had the strong bond of language to the thought and the survival of France.  Yet most writers sometimes hinted edginess towards the hierarchical imperialism of the Western states.  WW1 had shown again that constructive ideologies articulated from the West might not be able to contain violence, or its Catholic and secular streams be synthesized.

Because “defensive alliances which have fixed and limited objectives are often more durable,” the “Syria-Iran alliance has survived” more than three decades of unwavering and insistent US – led military, economic, diplomatic and media campaign to dismantle it, but it is still enduring “because it has been primarily defensive in nature” and “aimed largely at neutralizing … Israeli capabilities and preventing American encroachment in the Middle East.”

This was the conclusion of the professor of International Relations at Webster University Geneva, Switzerland, Jubin M. Goodarzi, in his 2006 book, “Syria and Iran: Diplomatic Alliance and Power Politics in the Middle East.”

Professor Goodarzi’s conclusion is worth highlighting amid the thick smoke screen of “chemical weapons,” “civil war,” “responsibility to protect” and the “dictatorship – democracy” rhetoric of the US – Israeli propaganda, which is now misleading the world public opinion away from the core fact that the current Syrian conflict is the inevitable outcome of the 45 - year old Israeli occupation of the Syrian Arab Golan Heights in 1967.

Israel, protected by what President Barak Obama repeatedly describe as the “unshakable” support of the United States, is still maintaining its military occupation of the Golan as a “bargaining chip” to enforce upon Syria, irrespective of the regime and who is ruling in Damascus, the fait accompli which was created forcefully by the creation of the State of Israel in Palestine in 1948.

The US support to dictating the resulting fait accompli to Syria manifested itself first by empowering Israel by US arms and tax payer money to gain the “bargaining chip” of the Golan Heights, then by protecting the ongoing Israeli occupation of this Syrian territory.

The “bargaining chips” of the Sinai peninsula and the West Bank of River Jordan proved successful by dictating the Israeli terms on the signing of the “peace” treaties with Egypt in 1979, with Jordan in 1994 and the Oslo peace agreements with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993, but failed so far to produce similar results with Syria and Lebanon, which remain in a “state of war” with Israel, mainly because Damascus still insists on making peace according to international law and the UN resolutions.

Damascus “did” engage the peace making process. The assumption to power of late al-Assad senior in 1971 was hailed by the US and its regional allies because he first of all recognized the UN Security Council resolutions No. 242 and 338, the basis of the US – sponsored so – called Arab – Israeli “peace process;” he fell out with his “comrades” in the ruling Baath party specifically because of this recognition.

Instead of building on al-Assad senior’s constructive approach, Washington made every effort to pressure him to accept the “Israeli” terms of peace: US sanctions were imposed on Syria and the country was condemned as a state sponsor of terror because of hosting the political offices of anti - Israeli occupation Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements.

Only months after its invasion of Iraq, the US concluded it was very well positioned -- and Syria very well cornered between US occupation in the east, the Israeli occupation in the west, the Jordanian, Palestinian and Egyptian peace accords with Israel in the south and the Turkish NATO member in the north - - to pressure Syria into submission.

On December 12, 2003 the Congress passed into law the “Syria Accountability Act,” the main purpose of which was to disarm Syria and deprive it of all its defensive means and “resistance” allies, long before the eruption of the ongoing current conflict in Syria. 

The act demanded the withdrawal of the Syrian forces from Lebanon, ignoring the fact they were there upon the official request and blessings of Lebanon and the US themselves and the Arab League to secure Lebanon and help it recover after the civil war.

Their withdrawal has become indispensable only after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, in the hope the invasion will dictate a peace treaty to Lebanon, which would have left Syria a peace pariah among the Arab immediate “neighbors” of Israel. No surprise then the Syria – Iran alliance was formalized in March that year with a series of bilateral agreements. The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 only accelerated their strategic cooperation.      

More importantly, the act banned Syria’s engagement “in the research, development, acquisition, production, transfer or deployment” of “weapons of mass destruction,” “biological, chemical or nuclear weapons” and “medium and long range surface – to - surface ballistic missiles,” of course without any reference to Israel’s acquisition of the same and more.

Egypt’s signing of its “peace” treaty with Israel in 1979 deprived Syria of its regional strategic Arab partner in the 1973 war and the collapse of the former Soviet Union deprived it of its international one a decade later, leaving the country off balance.

To strike a defensive alternative “strategic balance” with Israel has become the overriding strategic goal of Syria. No Arab substitute has been available. The revolution in Iran in the same year came as a God – sent breakthrough. The Syria – Iran alliance was cemented ever since. Dismantling this alliance has become the overriding US – Israeli strategic priority as well.

Until Syria finds an Arab strategic defense alternative to Iran or until the United States decides to mediate unbiased peace making between Syria and Israel, the bilateral Syrian – Iranian alliance will endure, unless Washington decides to repeat in Syria its failed invasion of Iraq, which all indications render a mission impossible.

To end the Israeli occupation of the Golan Heights and other Arab Israeli – occupied lands is the shortest US – Israeli path to dismantling the Syria – Iran alliance and to peace in Syria and the region.

That only would ensure that Syria will shift its outward focus strategically from looking for strategic balance with Israel to liberate its occupied land to the development of its society internally.

Ending decades of confusing the “national interest” of the United States as one and the same thing as that of Israel will for sure lay a solid ground not only for a Syrian but as well for an Arab - US constructive and just relationship built on mutual respect and common interests within the framework of international law and the UN charter.

This is the only and shortest path to peace in Syria and the Middle East, the time saving recipe and the less expensive in human as well as in economic resources. Herein the US can secure its regional “vital” interests “peacefully” without dragging its people and the region from one war to another incessantly.  

Peace and injustice cannot coexist.

* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com

 

From my point of view, President Obama has managed this heated issue so far with tact and wisdom about how to avoid war despite the beating drums.  I do not think that the Obama administration is really serious about U.S. military involvement in Syria.  If it were serious, what prevented them from striking over the past two years, since the summer of 2011, when the Syrian popular movement was militarized in order to push the situation in Syria toward international military intervention?  This could have happened earlier under better conditions for the Obama administration, but it did not, despite requests from some Syrian, Arab, regional, and American parties.

It is always important to remember what was said by former Republican Robert Gates, who served as the U.S. Secretary of Defense during Bush’s administration and the first two years of Obama’s first administration.  Gates said that any U.S. Secretary of Defense who comes after him should double-check his sanity if he gets involved in a new war in the Middle East.

Over the past few weeks, President Obama has tried to demonstrate his credibility about the "red line" on the use of chemical weapons, and the credibility of his promises to the American voters who supported his presidency as a stand against the wars of the previous administration and his promises not to repeat the mistakes of the policy of unilateral wars and ignoring the role of the UN Security Council. He made the world hold its breath for several days anticipating a military strike in Syria. He also made America and the whole world face the possibility of war in the Middle East, which the U.S. knows how to start, but does not know how it will end. In the midst of this political and media heat, the American and European public realized the seriousness of the calls by some local politicians for direct military intervention, including Senator John McCain for the past two years and a number of other American politicians and writers.

Obama has managed in recent days to convert the hammer that was over his head as a result of not intervening militarily in Syria, into a sword in his hand against his opponents inside the U.S. and abroad. The Obama administration is fully aware that the consequences of a military intervention, even if limited, would cause a military reaction from its opponents to which the U.S. would have to respond. That would escalate into a broad military involvement that would ignite the entire Middle East into a devastating war.

Perhaps it is more reasonable and logical to believe that Obama’s political and media maneuvering in recent days has achieved several goals, without leading the world to the brink of war.  Thus far, the Obama administration has gained much out of this media and political war. It has demonstrated to the world that America still carries heavy military weight and can still shake the pillars of the whole world.  It also made direct political gains, including:

·        Responding to the American public by both calling for war, yet not engaging in it. Those who want American military intervention found Obama's position in this heated atmosphere suited to them and their desires. And those opposed to U.S. military involvement breathed a sigh of relief when Obama decided to delay action and place into the hands of Congress the decision about whether to conduct military strikes against Syria.

·        Demonstrating Obama's commitment to the "red line" and turning the use of chemical gases into the most important international issue, even though the number of people killed in the Syrian war prior to the use of chemical weapons had already exceeded one hundred thousand!

·        Answering the administration’s critics who accused it of weakness, lack of credibility, and damaging the U.S.’s global reputation and prestige -- first among whom is Senator McCain who was extremely harsh on Obama before his threat to strike Syria. We find now that President Obama has placed the issue of American military intervention under the responsibility of both houses of Congress.  If Congress approves military strikes, its members then become responsible for the repercussions, and if Congress does not support the strikes, then not the least reproach or criticism could be legitimately made against Obama afterwards.

***

None of the above is an acceptable excuse for the international tension that has been created. Questions still remain about who used the poison gas in Ghouta Damascus, as in Khan Al-Asl previously, and who benefitted from it.  Why exclude the possible involvement of a third party, and not the Syrian Government or the Syrian National Coalition opposition?  Why could it not be extremist forces cooperating with Al-Qaeda-type groups who are behind the use of the poison gas?  They would benefit in two ways:  the U.S. and Syrian Governments would be at war against each other, thus weakening both, and these extremist groups can gain a greater foothold in Syria and the entire Middle East.  Why did the U.S. ignore the results of international investigator Carla del Ponte’s report in May after a preliminary investigation of the Khan Al-Asl gas attack revealed that the attack had been perpetrated by opposition parties? (1)

Also, why ignore the Israeli interest and the possible role of the Israeli intelligence service and its Syrian and Arab clientele in the use of chemical weapons?. It is easy for armed groups to carry out these attacks, as happened in the Tokyo subway several years ago.  Israel simply could not accept the progress the Syrian Government forces had made in most areas of the country prior to the chemical attach.  In addition, Israel’s military has intervened against Government forces over the past two years, and it cannot allow the war to end in favor of the current regime and its regional and international allies.  This would be considered a security risk to Israel itself, and a failure in betting on the continuation of Syria’s civil war and spreading the violence throughout the Middle East so that entire Arab countries and institutions collapse, not just certain regimes. (2)

The Obama administration is aware that the Netanyahu Government has worked since 2009 to provoke a U.S. military confrontation with Iran and its allies in the region; however, for over five years the Obama administration did not fall into several Israeli traps designed to serve that goal, despite Israel’s strong support in the U.S. Congress.  This is what provoked Israel’s friends in the United States to press for military strikes. 

Although the U.S. also did not want the Syrian crisis to end in favor of the Syrian Government, which would help America's adversaries in the region and the world, the U.S. has no interest now in military involvement in the Middle East, or in further aggravating its relations with Russia, China, and other international powers.  In contract to the Israeli designs to spread the violence throughout the Middle East, the U.S. seeks to achieve a comprehensive political settlement in the region.

The Obama administration now has a golden opportunity to capitalize on the escalation and tense and heated atmosphere in order to unnerve world players, Moscow specifically, into working toward an international solution, through the Geneva Conference 2, which is yet to be agreed upon, in order to achieve political settlements to several crises in the Middle East.  Then history will not wonder about the wisdom of the Nobel Prize Committee awarding President Obama a Peace Prize when his administration was only a few weeks old!

                  By Dr Dennis Walker,  Researcher,

                  Monash Asia Institute, Monash University, Caulfield 3145. 

                   Email: --- dennis.walker@monash.edu

                   Phone: 9540 8441 (mornings).

 LEBANESE CONCEPTUALIZATION OF GERMANS

               Wilhelmian Germany became more and more unattractive to pro-clerical Maronites well before WW1 because of its tightening alliance with the central government in Constantinople that from 1908 was usually led by the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP).  The new Young Turk elite gave much more scope to threatening secular ideas throughout the Empire than had Sultan ‘Abdul-Hamid with whom Maronite Patriarch Ilyas al-Huwayyik had built up a live-and-let-live alliance in which he conceivably may have helped the Ottoman government repress local Maronite secularists FN[[Dennis Walker, “The Relations of Catholic Maronite Patriarch Ilyas Butrus al-Huwayyik with the Ottoman Turks”, _IslamoChristiana_ 28 (2002) pp. 109-123]]FN.  The CUP also had centralizing impulses, and Germany was helping it improve its military capacities: as soon as they brought the Ottoman State into the War, the CUP militarily ended Mountain Lebanon’s autonomy.  After WW1, Christian authors in Arabic rapped “Germany, the aider of Turkey” for “allowing” sweeping violence by Turks, Kurds and Circassians against [mainly Syriac-speaking and Armenian] Christians in Mesopotamia and [in today’s Turkey] Diyar Bakr, Mardin, Tur ‘Abdin etc during the War --- criminality by association rather than having taken part FN[[Review of the 509-page book _al-Qusara fi Nakabat al-Nasara_ in _al-Mashriq_ January 1920 pp. 71-2.  Dr Gabriele Yonan of Germany was in 2000 researching links between Wilhelmian ministries and military and Ottoman attacks on Syriac-speakers during WW1]]FN.

              In most Catholic Arabic reviews of World War 1, the German side is portrayed as expansionist  --- it is led to attack by a materialist drive for resources and trade, but more out of some anti-human barbarism or by the personal despotic decision of the Kaiser, and is almost anti-Christian in this portrait that drew so heavily on propaganda in the French media.

             Generally, _al-Mashriq_ in the new particularist statelet rarely voiced nuances about Germany’s pre-War situation and her economic motives, but did very briefly glimpse an intellectually muscular pacifist counter-discourse in Britain.  This tradition was represented by pacifist Norman Angell, one of whose works in French translation was reviewed in _al-Mashriq_.   Angell had from the 1900s been urging Britain not to demonize the Hun Kaiser Wilhelm II, but rather to take his Anglophilia on face value.  While Angell had recognized that Germany’s 1914 thrust into Belgium and attempt to conquer France amounted to aggression, he interpreted it as motivated by her relentless population increase and pressures caused by the refusal of the Triple Entente states to grant industrializing Germany constructive economic outlets  In the wake of WW1, _al-Mashriq_ noted, Angell was arguing that the articles of the peace that the Allies concluded in Versailles “could expose Europe to terrible chaos because they have sentenced the Axis states to pressure, degradation and slavery, although their level of development and the extent of their economies and resources would suffice to rescue the states of the world in general from their economic crisis.”  The _al-Mashriq_ review concurred that even defeated milch cows, once even their teats are torn out, can never yield milk again FN[[Review by Fr G.  Levenq of Norman Angell, _Le Chaos Europeen_ translated from the English by Andre Pierre (Paris: B. Grasset 1920), _al-Mashriq_ July 1920 pp. 553-4]]FN.

             More forward-thinking voices from among even the ranks of the vengeful French themselves were nudging Lebanon’s Catholics to a more sympathetic understanding of the deep harm the late conflict had caused to Germany as well.  To be sure, an _al-Mashriq_ review of a 1919 French work by Dr Ambroise Got ascribed the continuing suffering of the German people as “completely the result of the pomposity of the deposed Kaiser Wilhelm and his transgression of all limits of moderation and equity”.  Still, the Alsatian-French author Got had reached the conclusion in his on-site researches with the French Mission in Berlin that Germany would never be able to lift itself to its feet again, however favorable the conditions, except after long years given the reparations it had to pay back to the Allies as compensation for everything it had destroyed in other countries. Thus, the Treaty of Versailles had to be revised.   As one of the sons of [marginal, bilingual] Alsace, Got had been well equipped to write an incisive overview of all the diversity of political parties, class conflicts and insatiable revanchist movements that had arisen since the deposition of the Kaiser FN[[Review by Fr Gabriel Levenq of (Dr) Ambroise Got’s _L’allemagne apres la Debacle_ (Strasbourg 1919), _al-Mashriq_ July 1920 p. 553]]FN.  (Got was overly pessimistic: the German currency was to restabilize in 1923, and the following year the Allies agreed to evacuate the Ruhr and grant Germany a more realistic payment schedule for reparations: by 1927, German industry had regained its 1913 high, but then the Great Depression hit all the world).

               _al-Mashriq_ apprised its readers of the debate between (a) John Maynard Keynes and others who argued that the terms imposed by the  Allied powers had not merely harmed Germany but the economy of Europe as a whole, _and_ (b) French authors who argued that the Germans had the means to pay the reparations they owed for the losses of life and property that their aggressions had cost France, Belgium, Rumania and Italy FN[[Review by “J.L.” (=Fr Gabriel Levenq?) of Keynes _Les Consequences economiques de la Paix_ (Paris: Nouvelle Revue Francaise 1920 --- 9th printing!) and of Raphael Georges Levy, _La juste Paix ou la Verite sur le Traite de Versailles_ (Paris: n.d.), _al-Mashriq_ December 1920 pp. 1031-1032]]FN.  But guidance from _al-Mashriq_ to critical and undecided European works on Germany and on the recent conflict and its ongoing effects in the 1920s were a margin constricted in the space allocated.   The stray items were almost drowned out by the tendency of Shaykhu and other clerical Lebanese writers to relay the French mentors’ hatred of Germany and its people. 

_Connections through Catholicism to Germans_

             Catholic universalism finally reasserted itself over the French nationalism, given a Christian patina, to which their auxilliary language had drawn these clerical Lebanese.  In one brief note, Shaykhu did rap “some extremists” in the victorious Allied powers who were expelling Catholic German missionaries from their Third World missions “lest, it is contended, they misuse religious evangelization as a means to propagate… love towards their homeland”.  Shaykhu added his “weak voice” to that of the Pope and others to protest at restrictions that were further depriving a number of lands of the blessings of evangelizing “Christian civilization”, given that the World War had cut down so many missionaries.  The Allies could still try any Germans charged to have deformed the religion into an instrument for temporal aims, so alien to the thinking of Catholic missionaries FN[[Shaykhu, review of J. Neuhaesler, _Appel aux catholiques de l’univers pour sauver les missions allemandes_ (Munster 1920), _al-Mashriq_ July 1920 p. 554-555]]FN.  [As though some Francophone Western missionaries had not inculcated love of the French state in the Fertile Crescent!]

             In 1922, the science-aware Rafa’il Nakhlah al-Yasu‘i tried to supplement or modify the hostile image of Germany that the French language had so deeply implanted in the opinion-makers of “the Catholics of the East” whom he now addressed. Nakhlah voiced understanding of the hatred that came from all corners against the people of the “covetous” Wilhelm II from its brilliant triumph in the 1870 war with France to its igniting of the flames of the late World War that had spread death and destruction over all areas of Europe.  He took issue, though, with some who “have exaggeratedly dismissed Germany as in its entirety a purely materialist civilization that uses intellectual powers or the progress of the sciences and arts only to increase material prosperity and to expand the country by violating the rights of neighboring nations.”  In correction [to this particular Catholicist view of Germany in the Arabic lands], Nakhlah highlighted as an instance of “real eternal civilization --- justice, mercy [religion and ethics]” --- in German life the association of Catholic pupils in German secondary schools, the Neudeutschland or Young Germany, founded immediately after the War and which by 1922 now had 25,000 members. High Church clerics appointed all leading office-holders of the youth movement they had started.  Resolved to spread “Chastity” in “insolent” Weimar Germany, the students [as did the clericist Maronites] fought all that could foster promiscuity and prostitution in literature, cinema, theatre, public art, and fashions FN[[Rafail Nakhlah al-Yasu‘i, “Almaniyal-Fatat: aw Jam‘iyyat al-Talabat al-Kathulik” (Young Germany or the Association of Catholic Pupils), _al-Mashriq_ July 1922 pp. 626-641]]FN.  [Jesuits organizers inculcated the rational and intellectual side of Catholicism; but most of the middle class youths may have been drawn by the sports, country strolls and holidays the Association conducted, more than its spiritual retreats]. 

             Bismarck’s --- Protestantism-motivated? --- Kulturkampf against Catholic schools was in the memory of Lebanon’s Catholics when WW1 came.  The less France-bound Nakhlah, who had some real Catholic universalism, liked Young Germany’s stress on science beside religion.  This and its retention of Homeland at the side of religion helped shape predilections he passed on to the Maronite discursive tradition. (Some Germans were to assess long afterwards that such Catholic German youth movements and schools paved the way to the conversion of their middle-class youths to Nazism because they taught nationality and sniped at the urban, pluralist society of modernity emerging under Weimar) FN[[Friedrich Heer, _Revolutions of Our Time_ (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1974) p. 60]]FN.

               Rafa’il  Nakhlah hoped, wrongly, that Germany could be redeemed into a polity in which Catholicism could flourish after the War.  Yet, many Maronites had swallowed whole French nationalism’s view of Germany under the stimulus of WW1, although with adaption to their own clericist priorities.

                The Catholic clerical media in Lebanon tended to support the most hard-line French positions towards Germany well into the 1920s.  In early 1923, _al-Bashir_ rapped strikes by miners, boycotts and passive resistance against the French occupation in the Ruhr, and claims that by seizing coal mines and factories France had paralysed commerce and industry there.  In refutation, _al-Bashir_ set out the assessments of the French ultrist politicians.  In occupying the Ruhr after WW1, France had only been matching Germany, which in 1870 occupied provinces of France that she only evacuated after getting reparations for her losses in that war.  France had to protect herself lest Germany catch her off-guard again.  _al-Bashir_ did not just approve France going beyond the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which had only approved destruction of fortifications on the left bank of the Rhine, for security.  It further relished all the harm France’s seizure for “reparations” of one of the few remaining sources of coal for Germany did the latter’s industrial economy, and connived at impulses in the French elite  to set up a puppet “Republic” of the Ruhr for the long term --- here, _al-Bashir did not consider any right of its 445,000 Germans to self-determination FN[[“Mushkilat al-Ruhr: Mal-Tariqah ila Halliha?” (The Problem of the Ruhr: What is the Best Way to Solve it?), _al-Bashir_ 24 March 1923 p. 1; “Fil-Ruhr” 24 March 1923 p. 1]]FN.  Militarism: _al-Bashir_ excerpted accusations by War Minister Maginot in the French parliament that Germany was trying to rebuild its forces.   Thus, France had to apply conscription to build a strong army of 52 divisions with “brutal” budgetary allocations FN[[“Faransa Turidu Jayshaha Qawiyyan: Innahu Khayru Daman li-Sawn al-Salam” (France Wants Her Army to be Strong: that is the Best Guarantee for Protecting the Peace), _al-Bashir_ 10 March 1923 p. 1]]FN.

                Culturally and in thought, the engagement of Maronites who preferred high Arabic with France was often glaringly superficial.  Yet, the high drama of France’s struggle for survival in WW1 implanted in the literate discourse of the Maronites and Melkites many anti-German motifs from French nationalism.  Some Lebanese Christian writers remained jumpy in the 1920s that the violence and mayhem of World War I could resume at any time.  They continued to worry about France’s safety from the expansionism of Germany, towards which they would remain suspicious and hostile in its Nazi period, in common with Muslim liberal intellectuals in Egypt and the Fertile Crescent FN[[An instance of the relaying of the most radical French nationalist hatred of Germany during Hitler was “Germany Has to Be Dismantled to Build a Peace that can Last: the French Press Warns About Repeating the Mistake of Versailles” (Yajibu Tafkik Jarmaniyyah li-Tawtid al-Salam: al-Sihafat al-Faransiyyah Tuhadhdhir al-Wuqu’ fi Khata’ Versailles), _al-Bashir_ 18 September 1939 pp. 1, 4.  The Lebanese Francophiles predicted a French triumph over Hitler too soon: Yusuf Natur, “Bayn Ghilyum wa Hitler: wa ‘alal-Baghi Tadur al-Dawa’ir” (From Wilhelm to Hitler: Only Catastrophes Befall Those Who Aggress), _al-Bashir_ 18 September 1939 p. 3.  _al-Bashir_ relayed some tawdry disinformation from Allied propaganda offices via a Damacus paper: “Across History Germany has always been and remains the Enemy of the Arabs and Muslims” (‘Abr al-Ta’rikh: Almaniyah Kanat wa ma Zalat ‘Aduwwat al-‘Arab wal-Muslimin), _al-Bashir_ 18 September 1939 p. 5]]FN.

                 By 1920, a friends-enemies dichotomy --- “liberal” France versus militarist, post-Christian Germany --- had been set for the long term in the Lebanese Catholic ethos.

Located at the crossroads of several regional crises, including the Palestinian – Israeli and Iraqi conflicts, Jordan has been in the eye of the Syrian storm for more than thirty months, and managed to navigate safely so far, but the reportedly imminent US strike is pressuring the country between the rock and the hard place of the antagonists of the war on Syria.

Heavily burdened by the pressure of its strategic allies and financers in the US and the GCC Arab states, who have been leading an unwavering bloody campaign for a “regime change” in Damascus, Jordan could not but yield to their demands for logistical facilities in the country, consequently shooting its self-proclaimed neutrality in the legs.

Thus, grudgingly or otherwise, Jordan has in practice invited potential US targets for Syrian retaliation on its territory if and when the Syrian government perceives that those facilities are used in any US-led strike, now expected.

Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, on August 29, interviewed by abcnews online, said that “Jordanian targets” could be targeted by Syria or by a Syrian allied “third party,” a possible development that could embroil the US in defense.

Should such a scenario develop, Jordan will evolve unwillingly into a war zone, to regret yielding to the prerogatives of its strategic alliance with the United States regardless of who emerges winner or loser in the war.

US Targets Invited

When the Eager Lion 2013 exercise ended in June this year, Jordan, inviting a US target for Syrian retaliation, asked the US military to leave behind some equipment, including some F-16s and a Patriot missile defense system.

Then, Jordan’s Prime Minister, Abdullah al-Nsour, indicated a second US target when he told reporters that some 900 U.S. military personnel were in the country, of whom 200 are experts training Jordanians to handle a chemical attack and 700 manning the Patriot system and reportedly 45 F-16 fighter jets.

On last August 14, Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that Jordan asked the United States to provide manned US surveillance aircraft to help keep an eye on its border with Syria; thus a third US target for Syrian retaliation was invited. 

The USA embassy would be a fourth target should any planned US strike target Syrian non-military presidential or governmental headquarters.

However the Centcom’s Forward Command in Jordan, officially called Centcom Forward-Jordan (CFJ), remains the oldest and the most important US target for Syrian retaliation.

In mid-August, Gen. Martin Dempsey was in Amman to inaugurate the CFJ, which is manned by 273 US officers, with a closed section, which “houses CIA personnel who control the work of US agents going in and out of Syria,” and also a communications center, where “atop the underground facility is a large surface structure accommodating the American military and civilian offices dealing with Syrian issues from Jordan,” according to the Israeli www.debka.com on August 17, 2013, which confirmed a report two days earlier by The New York Times according to which “American correspondents were allowed to visit the site under ground rules that its location not be disclosed.”

However, on October 18 last year the Egyptian Al-Ahram Weekly reported that the location chosen to host the CFJ was “a Jordanian military base built in an abandoned quarry north of the Jordanian capital Amman, just 35 miles from the Syrian border,” which extends 300 miles along Jordan’s northern flank, and some 120 miles from the Syrian capital Damascus. 

Al-Ahram explained that “the origins of the previously secret US deployment in Jordan” dated back to May the same year, “when the Pentagon sent American troops, including Special Forces units, to the country to participate in joint military exercises dubbed Operation Eager Lion. Some 100 military personnel stayed behind and were then joined by dozens more. The task force, according to the New York Times, is commanded by a ‘senior American officer’.”

Speaking to the media at the close of a two-day NATO defense ministers meeting at the time in Brussels, former US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta confirmed the existence of a “US task force that has been sent to Jordan this week after it was first reported in The New York Times,” Al-Ahram added. “The force would be tasked with ensuring the security of the chemical and biological weapons in Syria,” Panetta was quoted as saying. Al-Ahram’s report added: "the outpost near Amman could play a broader role should American policy change" and Washington decide to launch an intervention in Syria.

Denial in Doubt

The denial of the initial reports about the existence of the CFJ as “not true” by a spokesman from the country's armed forces, quoted by the state-run news agency Petra, sheds doubt on a statement by Jordan’s PM al-Nsour, quoted by the London –based pan-Arab daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi on Monday, that his country knows nothing about the timing, track and targets of a US military strike in Syria, which the US President is now seeking an “authorization” from the Congress to launch.

Al-Nsour’s “lack of knowledge” sounds odd in view of the long established multi-faceted strategic ties between Jordan and the United States, which makes it the obligation of Washington to inform Amman in advance of at least the “timing” of the imminent US strike and makes it an obligation of the Jordanian government to ask for it, at least to be on equal footing with the other Israeli strategic “partner” of the US; it is public knowledge now that the US is committed to inform Israel in advance of any imminent US strike on Syria.

In comparison, at least logistically, if not militarily, especially as far as the Syrian conflict is concerned, Jordan is much more important to the US than Israel to deserve a US warning in advance of any imminent strike.

Moreover, Jordan is in the immediate danger of being flooded with more Syrian refugees who for sure will be an integral part of the humanitarian crisis that the US strike will inevitably exacerbate in Syria.

Unless Jordan is denying its “lknowledge” to avert being accused by Syria of complicity with the US, al-Nsour’s “lack of knowledge” sounds more odd not only because his country hosts the CFJ.

Hosting and participating in the meetings of the US – led so – called “Friends of Syria,” as well as the military meetings of eleven chiefs of staff of “The Friends of Syria Core Group,” in addition to hosting the annual Eager Lion exercises, let alone the bilateral strategic ties between Jordan and the US and the anti-Syria members of the GCC, have all combined to posture the country as being an active member of what the Syrian government rename as the “Enemies of Syria,” who are party in the conflict and not part of its solution.

Moment of Truth Approaching

The Eager Lion exercises, from the start, focused on training to intervene and secure the purported Syrian chemical weapons if and when developments dictate such an intervention, which the imminent US strike is now turning into a matter of time.

Last June 18 the AP reported that the Eager Lion Drills “are focused on ground operations, involving commandos from Jordan ... practicing offensive operations.” Although the Jordanian embassy spokeswoman in Washington D.C., Dana Zureikat Daoud, told The Center for Public Integrity earlier this year that those drills are “not mission-oriented,” reported recent involvement of Jordanian commandos in Libya and elsewhere in the region gives credence to the reports on their possible involvement anew in Syria.

US Secretary of State, John Kerry, during his testimony at the Congress on Tuesday, while confirming that the administration of President Barak Obama “has zero intention of putting troops on the ground,” he in practice retained the option of sending US “boots” to Syria.

"I don't want to take off the table an option that might or might not be available to the president of the United States” in a scenario where "Syria imploded" and stockpiles of chemical weapons needed to be secured from extremists, he said.

It is public knowledge now that what Obama said will be a strike “limited in time and scope” aims at “degrading” Syrian chemical “capabilities;” the purported Syrian chemical weapons which are now very well secured will be far less secured after the strike and will demand immediate intervention to secure them.

So the moment of truth is around the corner for an intervention either from or with the participation of Jordan, where training in preparation for this moment has been going on by leaps and bounds for the past two years, expectedly inviting reciprocal Syrian preparations for retaliation.

A Syrian possible military clash with Jordan or with Jordanian – hosted US – led intervention units was only a postponed development and will most likely be accelerated by the US planned strike, which is expected to embroil Jordan militarily in the Syrian conflict, willingly or unwillingly.

Counterbalancing with Syrians

To counterbalance with the Syrians, who so far seem flexible enough or under too much pressure to open a diplomatic or non – diplomatic dispute with their southern Arab neighbor, Jordan kept the diplomatic and security channels of communication open with Damascus and went on record to offset its “enemy” posture, but only verbally, to make Jordan a place where words and deeds collide.

As recently as August 29, Jordan’s King Abdullah II after a meeting with Pope Francis, according to an official Vatican statement, reaffirmed that dialogue is the “only option” to end the conflict in Syria.

More than twenty two months ago, in comments in the Oval Office alongside President Obama, King Abdullah II was the first Arab leader to urge Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step aside. "I believe, if I were in his shoes, I would step down," he told BBC World News in an exclusive interview.

So far, Jordan declined to go public and on record in a clear-cut opposition to the imminent US strike; not excluding the military option, Information Minister Mohammad Momani said that “Jordan believes diplomatic efforts must be exhausted before Washington opts for military action,” but PM Al-Nsour said there will be “no strategic” benefit in insisting on striking Syria and he as well his Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh reiterated that the territory of the kingdom “will not be a launchpad for any military operation against Syria.”

Jordan’s noninterference in internal Syrian affairs is the officially declared policy, but the reported training in the country of Syrian opposition fighters, the recent visit to the country by the President of the Syrian National Coalition (SNC), Ahmad al-Jarba, the latter’s visit to southern Syria across the Jordanian borders and the reports about opening a SNC representative office in Amman after al-Jarba’s meeting with Nasser Judeh, and the reported infiltration of arms and “Jihadists” from Jordan into Syria are all indications that compromise Jordan’s officially declared policy of noninterference.

In April this year, Syrian President al-Assad said that Amman “is facilitating the passage of thousands of fighters into our country;” it was his first public warning to Jordan. His state TV told the Jordanians they were “playing with fire.” The Syrian newspaper Al-Thawra, also said in a front-page editorial that the Jordanian government “could not claim neutrality” anymore.

Al-Assad added that he had sent envoys to the kingdom during the preceding two months to remind Amman of the two countries' shared goal of fighting the “terrorists.” “The fire does not stop at our border and everyone knows that Jordan is exposed to what Syria is exposed to.”

In November 2005, al-Qaeda mounted a series of devastating bomb attacks at three luxury hotels in the Jordanian capital, killing some 60 people. The attacks were said to be in retaliation for Jordan hosting training centers for the new Iraqi army and police, and for becoming a de facto logistical transit base in support of the US occupation of Iraq in 2003.

* Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Birzeit, West Bank of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. nassernicola@ymail.com